Kant’s Theory of Value: On Allen Wood’s Kant’s Ethical Thought*

Many students take away a familiar and rather cartoonish image from studying Kant in college – that of an austere moralist who would have it that a righteous human life consists exclusively in an obligation to a supreme moral law (something which seems to involve arcane ‘universalizability tests’ for ‘maxims’ of action), that the claims of such obedience are unconditional, or trump, override, any other consideration about the human good, and that Kant’s theory claims that persons deserve moral approval if and only if they act strictly on the basis of the acknowledgment of that duty alone, with no primary regard (at least as the main motive in so acting) for the consequences of such action for their own or for anyone else’s beneŽ t,  ourishing, happiness. In this way, pure reason would have been shown capable of determining ‘all on its own’ what ought to be done, in no way relying on any substantive, empirical claim about human nature. Allen Wood’s Kant’s Ethical Thought is a vigorous, challenging, and scrupulously researched defense of Kant against such a traditional interpretation. (It proceeds, that is, on the largely correct assumption that the statement of the traditional interpretation itself already counts as a prima facie indictment.) Wood’s Kant hardly ignored (as is frequently charged) the issue of the moral life as a whole, or the substantive value that underlies it, or the anthropological and historical facts without which the theory remains formal and empty, or the role that moral commitments and difŽ cult judgments must play in a real (emotionally responsive, historically and socially situated) human life, and this Kant developed quite a sophisticated account of human nature, education, and human history in Ž lling out that sketchy college cartoon. The ‘rule-fetishism’ attributed to Kant, together with the casuistic universalizability tests associated with it, and the insistence on some pure and very likely impossible motivation in morally worthy action, are rejected here in favor of a more substantive moral ideal that itself cannot be fully articulated without invoking Inquiry, 43, 239–66